Contents

Synopsis

Carrie and Düring visit a refugee camp. Saul and Allison are at odds. Quinn stays on mission.

Episode guide

Now in Lebanon, Carrie Mathison pays a Hezbollah commander $40,000 in exchange for their protection in the refugee camp. The commander warns that with increasing instability in the area, he can only promise one hour of protection. Carrie and Otto Düring, along with bodyguards from the foundation, enter the camp, where Düring publicly announces his $10 million contribution.

Laura Sutton goes public with the leaked document revealing that the
CIA was illegally contracted to spy on German citizens. After a TV interview, she is temporarily detained by Astrid who pressures Laura for her sources. Saul informs Allison that she is being recalled from her post in Berlin due to the German chancellor demanding repercussions for the CIA's data breach. Allison reaches out to Dar Adal in an attempt to
save her job, and floats the idea of Saul being recalled instead.

After Düring wraps up his speech, Carrie and Mike eye a suspicious man approaching them. The man takes a hostage and is quickly shot by Mike, a suicide vest visible on his body. Carrie rushes Düring back to
their car and they speed away from the scene. When Carrie notices that they are driving into a suspiciously abandoned area, she forces the driver, Waleed, to stop, causing them to stop just short of an IED explosion. Once they get to safety, Carrie decides to stay behind in Beirut to investigate who was behind such an elaborate, premeditated attack. She is later visited by an associate of Al-Amin who reveals that they were betrayed by Waleed, and that Waleed confessed it was Carrie who was the target of the attack, not Düring.

Quinn successfully tracks and kills Fatima, a woman who was
recruiting children to be suicide bombers. Later on, he picks up a coded message which contains his next assigned kill. He decodes it to discover the name "MATHISON".

Guest Starring

Background information

With 10 positive reviews out of 10, the episode received a rating of 100% on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, with the site's consensus stating "Built around a thrilling terrorism plot that forces the main characters into difficult moral choices, "The Tradition of Hospitality" is Homeland at its best."

Ben Travers of IndieWire gave the episode an 'A-' grade, stating that ""Homeland" has set up a gripping premise for its new season, and I can't wait to see how it plays out". Joshua Alston of The A.V. Club also gave a grade of "A-", calling it a "thrilling episode" and praising how effective it was in bringing together various character threads.

"Homeland is racist" graffiti controversy

The scenes in the refugee camp on the Syrian/Lebanese border were filmed in a disused animal feed factory outside Berlin. To make it look more authentic, the set designers recruited some local Arabic-speaking graffiti artists. The artists, resentful of what they perceived as the series' racist depiction of Arabs and Muslims, spray-painted slogans such as "Homeland is racist," "Homeland is a joke, and it didn’t make us laugh" and "#blacklivesmatter", in an act of culture jamming. These slogans made it onto the show without any of the production staff noticing, resulting in some media outlets ridiculing the show for a lack of basic linguistic knowledge in an area of central interest to the show.

The artists themselves released a statement saying that they sought to disrupt the show because they believed that, to the show's producers, "Arabic script is merely a supplementary visual that completes the horror-fantasy of the Middle East, a poster image dehumanizing an entire region to human-less figures in black burkas and moreover, this season, to refugees."